Alan Jacobs

And isn’t there a place for just that – for a group of writers and thinkers to put out a publication that doesn’t seek to maximize pageviews or generate profits, but which dares to believe it has something to say, a point of view to fight over, and just gets on with it and hopes for the best? That was the formula we followed in the decade I worked there as editor and before. If you build it, they will come … and when I left it, we had over 100,000 subscribers. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a million, or even 105,000. They were the right 100,000 – and built a shared community of ideas and a heritage to fight over. That’s what’s missing in this era of pageviews and clickbait and sponsored content: a self-confident team that, at some level, doesn’t give a shit what others or even readers believe, as long as the debate itself is rigorous, fair, open and reasoned. I remember Michael Lewis throwing back his head and giving that barking laugh of his as he marveled: ‘The is the first magazine I’ve ever been a part of that never asks what its readers want.” Where is that kind of publication now?

It happens every week in Silicon Valley: a tiny startup working on some interesting technology is “acquired” by one of the bigger fish in the pond, Google or Apple or Facebook. Maybe the owners are hired; maybe it’s just the proprietary tech the big fish wants. If you happen to be a user of the startup’s product, and you’re lucky, the service or device you were using sticks around, just under a new and fancier brand name. But you probably won’t be lucky. Probably that service gets shuttered, or that device goes un-updated and un-supported, and the cool thing you got in on the ground floor of disappears forever.

As I say, it happens every week in Silicon Valley. It also just happened to a 100-year-old magazine. Why did Chris Hughes buy The New Republic if he were just going to turn it into another Buzzfeed? Why not just start something new, from scratch? Apparently he was just buying a domain name and a (pretty shopworn and moldy) brand, and was happy to throw the rest away, per Valley S.O.P.

In a staff meeting in October, the Daily Beast reports,

Presiding at the head of a long conference table, [new TNR CEO Guy] Vidra didn’t acknowledge Foer, who was seated beside him; he didn’t look at him; he didn’t mention him. Instead, as he started to speak, Vidra confided that he liked to stand up and move around the room as he communicated his thoughts, as though he were Steve Jobs unveiling the latest technological marvel. Oddly, he stood up, but he didn’t move.

Vidra spoke in what one witness described as “Silicon Valley jargon,” and, using a tech cliché, declared: “We’re going to break shit”–a vow hardly calculated to ingratiate himself with TNR’s veteran belle-lettrists, who feared that he was threatening the magazine’s destruction. Only a few interns dared to ask questions, which Vidra repeatedly dodged. “The senior people were too shocked to speak,” said a witness. “Jaws were dropping to the floor.” Through it all, Chris Hughes nodded approvingly, an unnerving grin on his face.

When I read this something clicked in my mind. It took me a few minutes to figure out what that click meant, but then it came to me: the “technical boy” in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. He’s one of the New Gods, not one of the worn-out, dilapidated deities of the Old World. When someone says a “mighty battle” between the Old and New Gods is coming, he sneers, “It’s not going to be a battle…. All we’re facing here is a fucking paradigm shift. It’s a shakedown. Modalities like battle are so fucking Lao Tzu.” Guy Vidra couldn’t have said it nearly so well. But it’s his thought, and Chris Hughes’s, in a nutshell.

There were some real problems with The New Republic, and it’s quite possible that without an infusion of technocratic cash it would have died before long. But at least it would have died something like a natural death, not like this. The old gods may be bitter and senile, but let’s let them die in their own beds rather than in a shiny new organ-harvesting facility.

At one point late in American Gods, Shadow, the protagonist, pauses to reflect on his preference for the old gods over the new. “It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés.”

This, I think, is the ground of the strange ‘relatability’ of these globally popular novels: not class, or race, or gender, or school experience or anything like that; and neither because of any quasi-Dickensian textual campaigning against social injustice, creditable though that aspect of the novel-series is. It’s that Rowling says to her child readers, repeatedly and eloquently: you are kings in disguise. You possess magical validity and force. And her child-readers grok it, because kids understand the Scottian insight better than adults do. Maybe that’s because they are closer to the time when all human beings share perfect, imperial elevation and power, when the whole of creation bends its efforts to placating and maintaining them – when we are babies, of course. Or maybe it is a more Chestertonian 'old religious conception’, the same numinous if unconscious awareness that Wordsworth ascribes to childhood in the Immortality Ode. At any rate, it goes some way to explaining (I think) why Harry has to be the central character, rather than Hermione. Hermione is too obviously special: too clever, too multi-talented and self-disciplined and grounded and so on. Potter is the chosen one not despite but because he is so ordinary; because (the novels are saying) mere common ordinariness, like yours, like mine, is the absolute ground of magical royalty. We are all kings in disguise.

… The equally popular, equally enduring Narnia books say the same things, for (where Lewis was concerned) equally Chestertonian reasons. Lewis’s ordinary English children are kings and queens of Narnia, not because Lewis thought representative parliamentary democracy delinquent and wicked, but because his faith told him that we are all of us, the entire demos, kings and queens of Narnia.

unapologetic-book:

Interview in the 10 December 2014 issue, online here.

Your book is not “apologetic” in the classic sense of presenting a rational defense of Christian belief designed to persuade skeptics. You explicitly focus on the emotional sense of Christianity. Do you think there is a place for the former kind of apologetics?

I’m not always intellectually convinced by particular moves that particular apologists make as they go about the traditional business of defending the integrity and plausibility of Christian ideas, but I absolutely accept the value of the task. It needs to exist in the Christian intellectual ecosystem and to be reinvented for changing contexts of ideas every generation, maybe every decade. I just don’t think it is the only persuasive tool we need, or that it is always the right one to reach people with.

Often, even when writers think they are beginning from scratch, conventional apologetics assumes a kind of basic assent from the reader to the idea that this religion stuff matters at all—that God is important enough that you’d want to devote your time to propositions about him. And for increasingly large numbers of people, that just isn’t true any more.

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If you hear anyone say, “Good grief, The New Republic isn’t dead, it’s just moving to New York and transitioning from being a magazine to being a ‘vertically integrated digital media company’ — you can safely ignore that person. The New Republic is dead and Chris Hughes killed it. You can rejoice in that fact, lament it, feel nothing; but it remains a fact.

In 1975 I was a college freshman with a part-time job and, consequently, a few dollars in my pocket for the first time in my life. Somewhere I came across an ad for discount magazine subscriptions, and in a heady moment I subscribed to three: the Village Voice, New Times, and The New Republic. The first two interested me, to some degree, but I didn’t renew. TNR I stuck with. I was occasionally intrigued, occasionally appalled, occasionally enlightened, always fascinated. The magazine’s combination of social liberalism and Cold War hawkery — a mixture that at the time found its chief Congressional proponent in Scoop Jackson — was something I had never seen before. I half-resisted it, half-apprenticed myself to it.

I kept my subscription for most of the next twenty years, though every few years I would cancel in disgust. I remember being particularly angered when a brash young editor named Andrew Sullivan ran what struck me as a pointlessly mean-spirited hit piece on Barbara Bush. That kept me away for a while; but eventually I came back. Until about five years ago I always came back. TNR was the one magazine I truly cared about, and it was a very big day for me when Leon Wieseltier, who edited the reviews, ran a commendatory review of one of my books.

By that time I had stopped pitching pieces to the magazine. I had tried for about fifteen years, off and on, and had never received a word of acknowledgement. (I was strangely gratified when I heard, just a few years ago, that when David Foster Wallace had asked to review a book Wieseltier hadn’t deemed him worthy of a response either.) But those long essay-reviews that Wieseltier ran remained a model for much of my own periodical writing. Even when they were wrong, or widely considered wrong, they were confident, expansive, audacious in the scope of their claims: think of Wieseltier’s own infamous hatchet-job on Cornel West, or Martha Nussbaum’s incisive (I say) demolition of Judith Butler, or Ruth Franklin’s nuanced and complex reading of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

These lengthy essays, and many like them, generated important conversations, and I don’t know whether there are many periodicals in America who still publish reflections on books that are so ambitious. Probably the New York Review of Books comes closest, though with some exceptions the NYRB reviews are more strictly “reviews,” less bold in their claims, more politely muted.

The front of TNR’s book was rarely so vivid, to me anyway, since I am not a policy wonk. But until a few years ago I read it faithfully. And until I few years ago I was usually a subscriber. The fact that I haven’t been subscribing recently, after so long a relationship with the magazine, may suggest that Chris Hughes had some justification for blowing the thing up. I don’t know. I just know that I’m sad, and I hope that I can find elsewere some of the things that, to me, made TNR special.

More importantly, Christians believe our baptism is not just a set of beliefs. One could come up with some new way to follow Abraham Lincoln or Ayn Rand and give it a brand new title. But Christianity joins us to a body of other believers. This biblical description of the “body” is so basic to the faith it’s almost not a metaphor: a new member is healthy tissue grafted onto a wound. The loss of a member is like the tearing away of flesh. Christ himself is our head, and we belong to one another. The very word “religion” has the same root as the word “ligament.” We are quite physically bound to one another.

This is especially important to reassert when we are tempted to say we’re with the head, but not the other parts of the body. We are all tempted to pick and choose our fellows, buffet-style. “I’m with Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa, but not the Southern Baptists.” No! We’re part of this body, with all its dazzling glory and all its tragic flaws, and cannot claim the former without the latter. Further, we are responsible for those parts presently misbehaving, and for its misdeeds through time—if we want credit for its virtues.

This is the part that really irks me the most on eschewing “Christian.” It’s as though we get off scot-free for historical Christian sins (the crusades, racism, you name it) by just calling ourselves something else. Christians believe there is a way to forgiveness and purity—but it passes through confession, restoration, and repaired relationship. The much more costly way to disassociate from those who have done ill in Christ’s name is to set about loving as fanatically as they hated.

Frankly, nothing is more controversial in American life than this issue of whether or not we are going to be reconciled across racial lines. I have seen some responses coming after simply saying in light of Ferguson that we need to talk about why it is that white people and black people see things differently. And I said what we need to do is to have churches that come together and know one another and are knitted together across these racial lines. And I have gotten responses and seen responses that are right out of the White Citizen’s Council material from 1964. In my home state of Mississippi, seeing people saying there is no gospel issue involved in racial reconciliation.

Are you kidding me? There is nothing that is clearer in the New Testament that the gospel breaks down the dividing walls that we have between one another. The gospel is what turns us away from hating our brother so much so that John says in 1 John 3 that the one who hates his brother is not of the spirit of Christ, but is of the spirit of the evil one, of the spirit of the devil. If that is not a gospel issue then I don’t know what is.

As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there was a time in our nation’s history when Americans would have revolted against the prospect of city police forces the size of small armies, or rampaging SWAT teams tearing through doors and terrorizing families. Today, the SWAT team is largely sold to the American public by way of the media, through reality TV shows such as Cops, Armed and Famous, and Police Women of Broward County, and by politicians well-versed in promising greater security in exchange for the government being given greater freedom to operate as it sees fit outside the framework of the Constitution.

Having watered down the Fourth Amendment’s strong prohibitions intended to keep police in check and functioning as peacekeepers, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of having militarized standing armies enforcing the law. Likewise, whereas the police once operated as public servants (i.e., in service to the public), today that master-servant relationship has been turned on its head to such an extent that if we fail to obey anyone who wears a badge, we risk dire consequences.

Consider that in 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US. By 2001, that number had grown to 45,000 and has since swelled to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year. On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. In fact, there are few communities without a SWAT team on their police force today. In 1984, 25.6 percent of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team. That number rose to 80 percent by 2005.

‘In the early 2000s, particularly after 9/11, we saw a paradigm shift from community policing and problem-oriented principles to the war on terror, and we became Homeland Security police,’ said Nolan, who has worked in the federal agency’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

He said this shift toward ‘homeland security’ had quickly destroyed the relationships police had worked nearly two decades to build.

‘I think what has happened as a direct result of that, is that those relationships that we forged, and worked so hard to attain and to maintain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, began to erode because the police were seen, particularly in communities of color, as an army of occupation,’ Nolan said.

‘If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality,’ he continued. ‘We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities – particularly in communities of color.’

And yes, we are living longer, but this has disappointingly little to do with any recent breakthroughs. Since 1970, the US Federal Government has spent more than $100 billion in what President Richard Nixon dubbed the ‘War on Cancer’. Far more has been spent globally, with most wealthy nations boasting well-funded cancer‑research bodies. Despite these billions of investment, this war has been a spectacular failure. In the US, the death rates for all kinds of cancer dropped by only 5 per cent in the period 1950-2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Even if you strip out confounding variables such as age (more people are living long enough to get cancer) and better diagnosis, the blunt fact is that, with most kinds of cancer, your chances in 2014 are not much better than they were in 1974. In many cases, your treatment will be pretty much the same.